Friday, November 13, 2009

HK Posters Continued

Way back at the beginning of this year I began scanning and posting some of the HK movie posters from the calendar that the HK Archives has published. Then I went on my merry travels for six months and could not finish. Yesterday, I remembered all this when I was looking for something else and came across the calendar and decided to get some more of the posters up. I love old movie posters I have to admit; all the detail, the style, the stars, the passion, the epic feel - modern movie posters have none of that as far as I can see. So here are ten more with others to come. These take the posters up to 1965. And the calendar up to March. Thanks as usual to the HKMDB for helping me identify the actors on the posters.

A few housekeeping notes. I finally had to give in and added that word recognition thing in the comments section - not that I get many legitimate ones but I was getting loads of spam; in particular from a Japanese web site in which the only word that I could read was "SEX". Don't the Japanese have their own word for this? What was weird is that most of them were directed into the Snow Girl post of a ways back and it got me wondering if Snow Girl is a term for some sexually deviant act that the Japanese have invented. It sounds like fun whatever it may be. Sex with a snowwoman? Using an icicle for immoral purposes? At any rate I got tired of deleting them everyday.

I don't know if anyone can help me with this technical Blog question. For no reason at all other than I want to plug a book, here is the long lead in. Two months back I borrowed the book, The Beatles Second Album (wonderful) by Dave Marsh from a friend and it led me into exploring a lot of the older music that influenced the Beatles and I actually created a neat playlist on my mp3 player of all the songs the Beatles covered and the originals - such as Anna and Soldier of Love by Arthur Alexander and it got me totally into him or Larry Williams who did Slow Down, Bad Boy, Dizzy Miss Lizzy and Bony Moronie (which Lennon did solo on his Rock 'N' Roll album). From there I read a book on Chess Records and began downloading music from their astonishing roster of stars in the 1950's/60's - Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Little Walter, Etta James, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and many others. This interest led me to a couple very cool blogs where they put up songs that people can listen to but can not download. I want to do the same for some of the Asian movie soundtracks that I have that are really hard for many people to get. But I have not been able to figure out how. I am sure it is easy but just yesterday I finally figured out how you embed a link to YouTube! The two sites that have mp3 files embedded are here:

- That song in HOLD YOU TIGHT when they're driving on the Tsing Ma bridge

- The chopstick song in CHINESE ODYSSEY 2002

Re RED ROSE, WHITE ROSE: Recently watched a pretty controversial theatrical adaption of the Eileen Chang work by the National Theatre of China. Believe it or not, Stanley Kwan's version was super tame by comparison!

The actress in the first poster (Shih Hwei) was known as one of the stars of leftist studios Great Wall and Feng Huang. She and actor husband Fu Chi were deported to China by the colonial HK government for active participation in anti-HK government protests in the 60s.

Pro-democracy activists of today should remember there wasn't political freedom in the old days either.